Airborne camera assemblies for capturing aerial photos are used for commercial and military cartography applications, including reconnaissance, mapping and terrain model generation. Conventional assemblies suffer from three drawbacks. (i) They are very expensive, because they use accurate wide-angle lens cameras with large format CCDs for replicating analog film cameras, inertial navigation units and motion stabilizers. (ii) They are very large and heavy, because they use large lenses. (iii) Due to short optical focal lengths, they require flight paths with low cruising altitudes. As a result, they have limited capability to cover large areas in short amounts of time.